Understanding Web 2.0

Last month, the second annual Web 2.0 Conference took place in San Francisco. Over 2000 people crammed into the Argent Hotel to listen to executives and entrepreneurs from Internet giants and other innovative companies discuss their plans for transforming the way we use the web and do business. To many it must have felt like 1998 again: venture captialists were handing out business cards, people were talking about "eyeballs" again, and instead of talking about starting one business, entrepreneurs were talking about starting three. But now there are new buzzwords - words like "B2B" and "push technology" have been replaced with terms like "user-generated content" and "AJAX" (which Kevin Maney, technology columnist for USA Today, defines as "an acronym for something you use to get money from venture capitalists). It's great to see that "Tech is back!". Whether another "bubble" is on the way remains to be seen. But what is clear is that the web continues to evolve providing new ways to entertain, educate, make money, save money and connect us all.

Most simply put, Web 2.0 refers to a perceived transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Proponents of this thinking expect that, ultimately, Web 2.0 services will replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.

The term was coined by Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media brainstorming with Craig Cline of MediaLive to develop ideas for a conference that they could jointly host. Dougherty suggested that the Web was in a renaissance, with changing rules and evolving business models. Dougherty gave examples: "DoubleClick was Web 1.0; Google AdSense is Web 2.0. Ofoto was Web 1.0; Flickr is Web 2.0." - rather than definitions. He recruited John Battelle for a business perspective, and O'Reilly Media, Battelle, and MediaLive launched the first Web 2.0 Conference in October 2004.

According to O'Reilly, Web 2.0 can be compared to Web 1.0 in this way:

Web 1.0________________Web 2.0_____________Utility
DoubleClick____________Google AdSense________Advertising
Ofoto_________________Flickr_________________Photo sharing
Akamai________________BitTorrent_____________Content distribution
MP3.com______________Napster_______________Music sharing
Britannica Online________Wikipedia _____________Encyclopedias
personal websites_______blogging_______________Personal pages
Evite__________________upcoming.org; EVDB____ Event planning
domain name speculation__search engine opt.______Business promotion
page views_____________cost per click__________Ad pricing metrics
screen scraping ________web services__________Content syndication
publishing______________participation___________Content creation
content mgmt systems____wikis________________Content management
directories (taxonomy)____tagging ("folksonomy")__Content classification
stickiness______________syndication____________Interoperability

In his paper What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Sofware Tim O'Reilly dicusses the key themes of Web 2.0. In short, these are the things we can expect to see:

• The web will become a platform where users control their own data
• The web will be used to capture and categorize our collective intelligence (through wikis, blogs, tagging, etc.)
• Data becomes the "Intel Inside", and there is currently a race on to own certain classes of core data (e.g., mapping information)
• No more software release cycles since the Internet offers software as a service and not a product
• Complex, proprietary software applications will be replaced by "lightweight", open-source programs that can easily be hacked and remixed
• New web services will offer rich user interfaces and PC-quality interactivity